Red
Storm, Sandia National
Laboratories News Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 27, 2004
Red Storm to be assembled
in New Mexico
Sandia supercomputer to be world’s fastest, yet
smaller and less expensive than any competitor |
Red Storm supercomputer project.
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Red Storm will be faster, yet smaller and less expensive,
than previous supercomputers, say researchers at the National Nuclear Security
Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories, where the machine will
be assembled.
The first quarter of the $90 million,
41.5 teraflops (trillion operations/second) machine should be installed at
Sandia by the end of September and fully up
and running by January, says Bill Camp (Sandia’s Director of Computation,
Computers, Information and Mathematics), who heads the effort to design and
assemble the innovative machine.
Performance testing will begin in early 2005. By the end of 2005, the machine
should be capable of 100 teraflops, after each single-processor chip is replaced
with a new chip that contains two independent processors, each running 25 percent
faster than the original chip.
Japan’s Earth Simulator, currently the world’s fastest supercomputer,
has a peak eight megawatts of power compared to Red Storm’s projected
two megawatts and takes up approximately three times the space.
Red Storm, an air-cooled supercomputer, is being developed by Sandia and Cray
Inc. using mostly off-the-shelf parts.
Design innovations permit the machine, from concept to assembly, to be completed
with unusual rapidity. While manufacturers typically require four to seven
years from concept to first product on a new supercomputer, Cray says Red Storm
will begin testing at Sandia less than 30 months after conceptual work began.
The main purpose of the machine
is work for the U.S. nuclear stockpile: designing new components; virtually
testing components under hostile, abnormal, and normal
conditions; and helping in weapons engineering and weapons physics. The machine
is expected to run ten times as fast as Sandia’s ASCI Red computer system
on Sandia’s important application codes. (ASCI Red held first place on
the top-500 list of the world’s supercomputers for three-and-one-half
consecutive years.)
But the machine, because of its
uniquely inexpensive design, may become the center of Cray’s future supercomputer line, says Camp. “From Cray’s
point of view, the approach we’re pioneering here is so powerful they
may want their next supercomputers to follow suit.”
The machine has unique characteristics: it is scalable from a single cabinet
(96 processors) to approximately 300 cabinets (30,000 processors). In addition,
the system was designed with a unique capability to monitor and manage itself.
Much of the cost incurred for the machine is non-recurring engineering design
costs.
“We couldn’t afford a ‘Rolls Royce’ — an entirely
custom-designed machine,” says Camp. “The way Red Storm is designed,
we don’t have to shut down to replace a part. We work around failed components
until we decide to fix them — all without shutting down.”
Cray was chosen because the company
was “forward-looking, flexible,
willing to work with us to design a new architecture, and had the lowest cost
proposal.”
The machine itself — a
few facts
The machine has 96 processors in each computer cabinet, with four processors
to a board. Each processor can have up to eight gigabytes of memory sitting
next to it. Four Cray SeaStars — powerful networking chips — sit
on a daughter board atop each processor board. All SeaStars talk to each
other “like a Rubik cube with lots of squares on each face,” says
Camp. “Cray SeaStars are about a factor of five faster than any current
competing capability.”
Messages encoded in MPI (the Message Passage Interface standard) move from
processor to processor at a sustained speed of 4.5 gigabytes per second bidirectionally.
The amount of time to get the first information bit from one processor to another
is less than 5 microseconds across the system. The machine is arranged in four
rows of cabinets. There are a total of 11,648 Opteron processors and a similar
number of SeaStars.
The SeaStar chip includes an 800
MHz DDR Hypertransport interface to its Opteron processor, a PowerPC core
for handling message-passing chores, and a seven-port
router (six external ports). SeaStars are linked together to make up the system¹s
3-D (X-Y-Z axis) mesh interconnect.
IBM is fabricating the SeaStar chips
using 0.13-micron CMOS technology. Visualization will occur inside the computer
itself — a capability unique to Red Storm
among supercomputers.
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory
operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department
of Energy’s National Nuclear
Security Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national
security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
Sandia media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078
Red Storm Contacts: James
L. Tomkins and William
J. Camp
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